Home / Series / Mathologer / Aired Order / Season 2018 / Episode 2

Pi is IRRATIONAL: simplest proof on toughest test

In the last video of 2017 I showed you Lambert’s long but easy-to-motivate 1761 proof that pi is irrational. For today’s video Marty and I have tried to streamline an ingenious proof due to the famous French mathematician Charles Hermite into the hopefully simplest and shortest completely self-contained proof of the irrationality of pi. There are a few other versions of this proof floating around and we’ve incorporated the best ideas from these versions into what I’ll show you today; I’ll list some of these other versions below. I also talk about the problem of pi + e and pi x e being irrational at the end of the video, really nice stuff.

English
  • Originally Aired February 3, 2018
  • Runtime 11 minutes
  • Network YouTube
  • Created February 12, 2018 by
    Administrator admin
  • Modified February 12, 2018 by
    Administrator admin